Where Are the "GREENLAND IS STRATEGICALLY VITAL!!!" People Right Now?

Did it stop being vital?

Photo from HUM Images via Getty.

Two months ago, I was getting into dumb online arguments (is there any other kind?) about Greenland. I thought it was strange that Greenland had vaulted to the center of our national security conversation out of nowhere; the word “Greenland” has not been spoken in any presidential debate this century¹. But I was assured by many people that Greenland was obviously vital and there’s been a lot of debate and I must have just missed it. And maybe that’s true; if true, I blame network television — their shows are just too good! How am I supposed to focus when new episodes of The Neighborhood and R.J. Decker are out there waiting to be watched and re-watched until I’m all laughed out?

But I’ve noticed that talk of acquiring Greenland is now…let’s say “subdued”. Which is odd — if acquiring Greenland was vital in January, then why isn’t it now? What happened to the argument that we must acquire Greenland because something something rare earth minerals, something something shipping lanes? I know that we’re all focused on Iran the Taylor Frankie Paul saga, but aren’t we putting our nation at risk by abandoning the goals that very recently brought us to the brink of war? Why are we treating our interests vis-a-vis Greenland like a Happy Meal toy, i.e.: It becomes utterly and forever uninteresting after a very short time.

As baffling as this turn of events is, one explanation fits: Greenland was a strange obsession by a weird man, and Trump fans engaged in Simone Biles-quality mental gymnastics to justify his actions. The minerals and shipping lanes arguments were bizarre because Denmark was an ally: We functionally already had access to the minerals and the shipping lanes. The only way to jeopardize that would be to trash our relationship with Denmark and NATO, which is exactly what we did. If we agree that minerals and shipping lanes are important — and I agree that they have some importance — then a smart move would have been to simply do nothing. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a bag of grapefruits with googly eyes sitting in the Oval Office would have handled the issue more deftly than Trump.

I’m mentioning this now because Trump’s reply guys will probably soon have to rationalize his capitulation on Iran. Trump seems to be laying the groundwork for a trademark Trump submission-that-would-humiliate-anyone-capable-of-humiliation. The Iranian regime is still in place, they still have their nuclear material, and a deal about Iran’s missiles or proxy support seems unlikely. Probably the main outcome will be that we killed an 86 year-old man, which is something that spoiled mayonnaise or a 90-degree day might have done on its own.

And I think that sycophantically backing whatever dumb thing your political tribe is obsessed with should carry a social penalty. There are many things about our current politics that I don’t know how to fix; there may not be institutional solutions for problems like media bias and presidential overreach. Sometimes, the best solution is “people should be embarrassed to do that.” And more than half of Republicans supported taking over Greenland, including eight percent who thought we should use military force and another 32 percent who weren’t sure. Personally, I think that’s nuts. But some people insisted that we had to act…where are those people now? Do they think we don’t notice that we’re back to giving Greenland pro-volleyball levels of inattention? Aren’t they embarrassed about treating this issue like an incoming nuclear missile and then saying “nevermind”?

Slavishly backing the Current Thing is obviously not exclusive to Republicans. The fact that it took years for many on the left to pinpoint Robin DiAngelo as a person who gives off unserious crank vibes capable of bending space-time will always be embarrassing. I know that none of us are truly independent thinkers — we all follow the crowd to some degree. But when the crowd decides to don clown makeup and roll around in Jell-O, and you loudly argue that clown Jell-O rolling is vital for national security and/or racial justice, I don’t think that you should be able to quietly walk that back without feeling some embarrassment.

So, I think we should dwell on the Greenland embarrassment for a minute. Trump will try to shove the whole episode down the memory hole, though there may not be room down there what with “Mexico will pay for the wall”, “I’ll solve Ukraine on the first day”, “We’ll have five percent GDP growth”, “I have a health care plan everyone will love”, and about 50 other things taking up space. And the people who make it possible for Trump to effortlessly glide from failure to failure have an opportunity to self-reflect. I hope they’ll take it, because we’re probably done talking about Greenland for the rest of our lives, but the problems that experience raised are still around.

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1. I CTRL+F’d the transcripts, which are online. And I mean general election debate — I didn’t go through all the primary debates.